Laura had reached her sixteenth year, when Mr Douglas was induced, by a larger benefice, to remove to a parish almost twenty miles distant from Glenalbert; and parting with her early friend, was the severest sorrow that Laura had ever yet known. Captain Montreville promised, however, that his daughter should often visit the new parsonage; but Lady Harriet's increasing illness long prevented the performance of his promise. After a confinement of many months she died, and was lamented by her husband, with that sort of sorrow which it usually costs a man to part with an object which he is accustomed to see, when he knows that he shall see it no more. It was on the third evening after her mother's funeral, that Captain Montreville prevailed on his daughter to take a solitary walk. Slowly she ascended the hill that overlooked the village, and, stopping near its brow, looked back towards the churchyard, to observe a brown hillock that marked the spot where her mother slept. Tears filled her eyes, as, passing over long intervals of unkindness, she recollected some casual proof of maternal love; and they fell fast as she remembered, that for that love she could now make no return. She turned to proceed;--and the moist eye sparkled with pleasure, the faded cheek glowed with more than the flush of health, when, springing towards her, she beheld the elegant, the accomplished, Colonel Hargrave. Forgotten was languor; forgotten was sorrow; for Laura was just seventeen, and Colonel Hargrave was the most ardent, the most favoured of lovers. His person was symmetry itself; his manners had all the fascination that vivacity and intelligence, joined to the highest polish, can bestow. His love for Laura suited with the impetuosity of his character, and for more than a year he had laboured with assiduity and success to inspire a passion corresponding to his own. Yet it was not Hargrave whom Laura loved; for the being on whom she doated had no resemblance to him, but in externals. It was a creature of her own imagination, pure as her own heart, yet impassioned as the wildest dreams of fiction,--intensely susceptible of pleasure, and keenly alive to pain, yet ever ready to sacrifice the one and to despise the other. This ideal being, clothed with the fine form, and adorned with the insinuating manners, and animated with the infectious love of Hargrave, what heart of woman could resist? Laura's was completely captivated.